Microsoft is giving users of Windows Vista and Windows XP Professional software extra time to put off their migration to Windows 7.
Before today, Microsoft said that after the release of the first Windows 7 Service Pack – which hit beta today and is due in the first half of 2011 – customers buying Windows 7 would no longer be …

Downgraded purchases.

So. Some Windows 7 licences claimed as sold are actually Win 7 equipped PC's downgraded to XP, some are actually Win 7 equipped PC's wiped and Linuxed. Some are actually options purchased by PC manufacturers and not yet built or sold.

I wonder how much of 'Microsoft's most successful OS ever' is actually used.

Alright, alright, here's a bloody title

Actually, whilst we're still deploying with XP, this is only pending the sorting out of some compatibility problems with one of our apps (ironically enough, a Microsoft one). We intend migrating to 7 as soon as that's sorted; it's a LOT better and runs on some fairly basic hardware.

And Vista before it

The two machines I use most, a quad core at home and a core 2 duo laptop, both arrived with Vista and were promptly "rescued" with Ubuntu. I spent about a week playing with Vista on the quad just to see what I was escaping and then happily wiped it. The laptop never even booted into Vista (used the paper clip trick to open the CD before hitting the power switch).

Windows 7

Windows 7 still lags behind XP users

Perhaps this also means that Windows 7 Professional and Enterprise is not being adopted among school and company IT departments as fast as Microsoft hoped.

One reason for this is the increased difficulty of creating and copying custom local user profiles on client PCs with Windows 7 (compared to Windows XP), and another is the lack of any easy upgrade path from XP (apart from reloading everything).

Didn't MS notice that Windows XP was their best-selling OS prior to 7's release, and remains so? Far and away, XP has the biggest user base of any current Windows OS:

My least favourite feature of Win 7 is

This version of (program name) is not compatible with the version of Windows you're running. Check your computer's system information to see whether you need a x86 (32-bit) or x64 (64-bit) version of the program, and then contact the software publisher.

Until W7 supports all the legacy stuff I have

It is not worth it trying to upgrade. XP with all the SW and HW I've got does what I need, I've run the W7 upgrade adviser and it has indicated that I got problems that will take time and money to sort out. The only reason I can see to upgrade from XP to W7 is to make more money for M$. I've been looking at Linux and all the HW will work and using wine under Linux and it appears that it has about the same issues with the SW as W7 has. So if M$ plays silly buggers I may make the change!

MS in a nutshell, there

decisions driven purely by marketing concerns rather than technical ones. MS doesn't actually care if you're running 7, as long as you've got a disc with a copy of it on somewhere that they can claim as another sale.

Only one reason to upgrade...

...is (as I understand it) XP's inability to support AES wireless security. And then if you do "upgrade" from XPsp3 to Win7, be ready for your system performance to drop to about 1/3 of what it was (personally experience, I am watching build scripts now take 3 times as long).

Or use the fact that Win7 is a totally alien environment to try a Linux distro and see if anyone actually notices!

There is one benefit with Win7, Flash is woefully unstable so there is less annoying web-crap. Although it does mean that Quake Live won't work. :o(

I think

I still run Vista

I run Vista SP 2 Business never had a problem or any issues, to be honest at this time I do not see the need to move Windows 7. Microsoft has to do more to entice me to move, like upgrade discounts around 30% or so, I mean it's not cheap to go out and get the upgrade.

Linux gives you free updates and upgrades that is avenue that I am seriously considering.

It's cuckoo time again........

Perhaps they might oneday get the hint that there are many long term resons why people do not upgrade either desktop or server.

We just bought into some Microsoft business software, shall remain nameless, and as I have anumber of shiny new servers as a result of the investment I thought that I would upgrade all my servers to 64 bit so I could utilise more memory and risk a migration to server 2008.

Along came the install team. 2 servers downgraded to server 2003 32bit and 1 to 2008 32bit, Microsofts own bloody software but it is unlikely to be compatible with their latest operating systems for another 2 years, by which time we will be on server nnn and maybe thinking of 128 bit.

Marketing in a netshell, there

"Extending the downgrade option on Windows 7 means that Microsoft can still claim the Windows 7 sale and feed the operating system into the customer base, while letting customers continue to use the software they like until they're ready to move."

Not with any honesty they can't. If the punter is running XP, then they are part of the XP customer base. To claim anything else is a bare-faced lie. I'm sure a respectable corporation like Microsoft has no intention of such mis-representations, particularly since it might have a beneficial effect on their stock price.